lunar new year dumplings in taipei

fragmented travelogue — where i share what i’ve learned about in snippets & fragments, and my thought process about something that intrigued me in my wanders through the world, society, and culture. find the whole collection here.

we made dumplings for lunar new year at a family friend’s house. i had never made dumplings for new year before. well, our family doesn’t really and has never really celebrated lunar new year officially so i don’t really know what’s the norm or tradition in most households. but i do know that in chinese culture, dumplings represent wealth and prosperity because of their physical shape resembling gold ingots.

now that i understand taiwanese history and politics better i did ask them about their dumpling making tradition. they’re in their 70s now and their parents came from Shandong, China, to Taiwan with the KMT due to the chinese civil war which ended in 1949 with the KMT fleeing to Taiwan with their supporters. they grew up eating dumplings for lunar new year and continue to prioritize making dumplings the “traditional way” (i add quotation around “traditional” because i believe there is no one form of tradition and it varies and is fluid depending on family and context), the way their parents made them. after all, one of them grew up with their parents selling traditional Northern Chinese goods (dumplings and various bings and baos), foods made of wheat that were not common in Taiwan before 1949.

Shandong, I learn, is in Northern China and it is where dumplings have been a traditional food for a long time. actually, most of the wheat-based food found in taiwan today (like noodles or the various buns and dumplings) has its roots coming from the waishengren 外省人 immigrants who came from northern china.

the family friend uncle was very swift and fluent in the dumpling making and it did turn out to be quite delicious with the dough being extra chewy. they emphasized their “lao jia” (老家 hometown, but really, ancestor’s home town) being shandong while they themselves have lived all of their lives from early childhood in taipei, taiwan. they taught me how to make the dumplings alongside them, which i tried my best to mimic but they had the skill of doing this for most of their lives. i could tell they had so much pride for the food they were making for this meal, the food of their hometown, a hometown they themselves never grew up in.

this is a waishengren family experience, the experience of those who’s families had fled mainland China with the KMT after 1949 and have stayed in Taiwan since. when i was younger i didn’t really realize there was so much varied experiences in culture and tradition within Taiwan, especially within the majority Han Chinese population, but now I know much more evidently that this island of 23 million people is diverse and holds varied cultural experiences, and is a nation made up of the mixes of immigration, settler colonialism, and the culture is very much shaped by the thousand years history of the island shaped by the indigenous people who lived (and continue to live) here and then later by the various colonizers and rulers (dutch, qing empire, japanese, kmt etc). i guess that is the one thing i wish people who are new to taiwan are conscious of, and remain open to learning more about.

on TV they were playing CCTV’s lunar new year show (the national broadcasted celebrations of LNY in china), not something you would expect or see in a taiwanese household, and i imagine, is on the rarer end. the show being played on TV reminded me of the lives and experiences of those here who still feel a strong connection to the place their parents were displaced from, even if that place is no longer the same place as the one their parents grew up in, and in fact, may have changed to the point of unfamiliarity. i think of the parallels to chinese immigrants living in the U.S. or in other places how the world rarely talks about this chinese diaspora experience in Taiwan as that of also of being that of an “immigrant’s”.

it frustrates me to hear taiwan be homogenized but then again, with the way we learn about culture and nation-states now, it’s like our brains short circuit to assume there is a singular culture and language in that one country, but that’s not how the world works. never has.

this day stuck with me because i find it fascinating, over and over again, when i encounter people or families who have a longing for a place they themselves didn’t grow up in. but they know it is where they are descended from. they see it as their “hometown”, their “old home” and have a lifelong attachment to it, while the present day realities of their life is in a faraway place surrounded by different cultures. i see parallels with 2nd+ generation Asian Americans who have a diasporic longing for the home of where their parents come from, except for it being a small town or provincial belonging, it is to an entire country or culture, or their imagination of what that is. and how the longing for a “home” is often associated with the stories our parents have talked about, and how it is especially prevalent for those whose families were unwillingly displaced but also to those who chose to migrate. and for me, i find the stories of waishengren’s descendants in taiwan to be fascinating because they ended up in a place they never chose but were forced to make a life here.

if you want to read more about the waishengren in taiwan migration experience, read: The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan by Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang. it helped me understand better the trauma of this population of people from that time and helps me understand so much more why present day politics are the way they are.

the more familiar i became with this history, the more conscious i am of it everytime i eat a dumpling here in taipei.